CAPTURING TWEETS ON CLIMATE CHANGE: WHAT IS THE ROLE OF TWITTER IN CLIMATE CHANGE COMMUNICATION?

Climate change is a major environmental issue that is often discussed throughout the world using social media outlets. One major social media site that is commonly utilized by the public is Twitter. Using a Twitter account and Ncapture we were able to collect tens of thousands of tweets around the COP21 event, a United Nations climate change conference held on Dec. 7-8, 2015 in Paris, using the hashtags @climate and COP21. This research aimed to follow and collect tweets about what the major influencers on Twitter are concerning this event, and subsequently climate change in general, and what content is most persistent. Specifically, we examined Twitter users with high numbers of followers (>10,000), the information sources/types, the number of re-tweets, and the frequency of tweets were as well as the category of the tweet in regard to positive, negative, and neutral positions about climate change. Activity ranged from 2000-3000 tweets per day and an analysis of ~1,000 tweets randomly sampled from over more than 150,000 tweets, showed that 53% of the tweets had a positive perspective about climate change, 12% were neutral, 13% negative, and 22% were unclear. We have tabulated the top 10 most influential Tweeters among each of the months (August, September, October, November and December) of 2015 leading up to and following the COP21 events, which included an array of Twitter users from NGOs, Politicians, Celebrities, Religious Leaders, Governmental Organizations, among others. We also examined tweets about climate change as they relate to the event and interpret why these tweets may have persisted in the Twitter space. From our observations, we will provide some best practices in how to create climate messages that have high reach and longevity in order to assist climate change communicators in understanding the role Twitter plays in regard to climate change discourse and how to most efficiently utilize it.